Messages - efranks

I've never been into Hot Wheels. Even as a kid I bought mostly Matchbox cars because that was what my local store sold.

However, back in December, I was in Target for a toy run and spun through the car aisle and saw a Hot Wheels car on the pegs but the bubble was entirely black with a question mark on it. After looking at I found out that there is a set of Mystery cars for 2007. I thought it was cool so I bought it along with one other, there were only the two. Since then I've been cruising the HW aisle looking for more and found 6 the other day.

One of them is supposed to be a Batmobile from one of the recent cartoons. They each have a barcode on them and supposedly Mattel will release info later in the year to tell you what car you have by the code but there doesn't appear to be any correlation...meaning all Batmobiles don't have the same code.

They're kind of fun and for the 6 of them it cost less than one Star Wars figure.

I still have my Joe glider. I got it from, I think, my Grandmother but never really played with it because it felt so fragile.

I really liked the VAMP jeeps, I had both Joe versions, and I had the Rattler for my Cobra team. I had more Joe vehicles than Cobra and even now, looking back, the Cobra stuff didn't match up well in the early days. Some how I made it through childhood without a HISS tank though.

Sometimes I wish I was still 12 when my buddies Todd and Mike and I set up huge wars across Todd's yard. Man, I miss that.

The W.H.A.L.E. was released in 1984 and again in 1988 in black as the Night Striker. It's the hovercraft and hasn't been re-released since then as far as I know. If it had I would have bought it, instead I pieced a vintage one together.

The producers of hit TV drama Lost have been handed an expensive headache after film canisters featuring master footage was erased by an airport X-ray machine. The show bosses are still trying to figure out who to blame for the costly mistake, which could leave them having to spend an extra $300,000 to reshoot the scenes on the destroyed film. According to sources, film of the show accidentally went through an x-ray machine at Honolulu International Airport in Hawaii, where the series is shot - and was wiped. Lost producers claim security personnel at the airport are to blame because they didn't take note of warning labels asking them not to put the film canisters through an x-ray machine. But airport insiders state the film canisters were mistakenly mixed in with passenger luggage, leading to the error.

Word is that airline officials will tell the producers who erased the footage but that any such statement could be contradicted in next week's episode.

I fell asleep about halfway through. Woke up, looked at the clock, saw Jack save Henri and Kate and Sawyer take off... ho-hum, went to bed.

Still not impressed. I want to like the show and still be interested in it, it's just not there anymore. I'll give it 2 more weeks but if something doesn't snag my attention again I'll go back to watching CSI:NY.

At least when Heroes gives you an answer, you have an answer. Unike Lost which is the show that's really pissing me off. I'm not even looking forward to its return at this point.

With Heroes, Prison Break and 24 all in full swing for the rest of the season, I'm not even missing Lost anymore. Now all I need is for Jericho to come back on and my week will be complete.

As for last night's episode, I thought we learned a lot, Hiro's part of the story aside. We found Claire's mom and dad. Peter is starting to understand his power and so is Issac. That's three plots that just got advanced.

The only story that's outside the main one is Niki's. Other than hooking up with Nathan she's outside the whole bomb thing. I just can't seem to figure out how she's going to fit into everything...or if she's even supposed to.

Just as a followup to my last post, Internet Explorer 7.0 is listed as a 'critical update' by Microsoft. That means that if you have automatic updates turned on you will eventually get IE 7. If you do a manual Windows Update it will also install by default, you have to uncheck its box to bypass it.

You can, however, install a registry entry that will tell Windows XP not to install IE7. It won't install as a critical update but will still be listed under "Software, Optional" so that you can choose to install it if you want.

First up, Internet Explorer. The upgrade that installed was for Internet Explorer 7.0. You can uninstall that to go back to your previous version by going to CONTROL PANEL and then ADD OR REMOVE PROGRAMS.

There should be an entry for "Windows Internet Explorer 7." The list is in alphabetical order so you'll have to scroll down to find it. Click on it and then on the REMOVE button. Follow the instructions from there.

If you want to keep IE 7 but just show the menu bar (File, Edit, View, etc) you can. Open Internet Explorer and press your ALT key. That will show the menu bar. Click on VIEW then TOOLBARS then MENU.

I don't really know why some of your favorites wouldn't work, though. I also don't know why fonts would be screwed up.

For the Avatar part, you're talking about making an icon that you can use on your profile here? Those are usually just pictures that are scaled down to a certain size.

It's a free tool that will let you resize, crop, convert and save your photos.

Let's say you wanted to do a screen capture of a window you had open, you would make that the top window, press ALT+PRINT SCREEN and then open Irfanview. Choose EDIT -> PASTE and it would fill in the screen you just captured. Use your mouse to draw out a selection box in the window and choose EDIT -> CROP SELECTION. Everything inside the selection you created would stay, everything else would go away. FILE -> SAVE and save it somewhere.

Posting to the site you mentioned...Not 100% sure on that. Once you have your file saved if that site allows you to upload then you can do it from their site. If you're looking to host the file on-line somewhere else then Photobucket maybe?

I'll be ordering Vista this week and plan on upgrading my main system at home. We probably won't switch to it till at least midway through 2007 for our company though.

I had Release Candiate 1 and 2 installed at home and it has some cool features and some that I didn't like as well. It's the same with all operating sytems from MS, it's pretty good and then you get Service Pack 1 and it gets better.

The main thing I like about it is the new interface, Aero. Very nice. Some of the cool aspects of the Mac but without the hardware prices. I've been using varous skinning programs to attempt to achieve a look that Vista now has built in which rocks IMO.

I got in but there are a couple links that really don't do anything for me. Plus it looks like there's a hidden code but if it's a password, I'm not sure where to use it...or I haven't figured out the userid/password combo yet.